People who regularly stay up until the wee hours of the morning could be harming their mental health, a new study finds. Regardless of whether people were morning larks or a night owls, they tended to have higher rates of mental and behavioral disorders if they stayed up late, researchers found. The mental health risk associated with staying up late cropped up regardless of a person’s preferred sleep timing, also known as their chronotype. “We found that alignment with your chronotype is not crucial here, and that really it’s being up late that is not good for your mental health,” said senior researcher Jamie Zeitzer, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford Medicine, in California. “The big unknown is why.” These findings run counter to previous studies which found that people who stick to their chronotype tend to be healthier, Zeitzer added. For the study, researchers tracked nearly 74,000 middle-aged and older people in the United Kingdom. More than 19,000 said they were morning types, while about 6,800 identified as evening types. The rest fell somewhere in the middle. The participants were asked to wear an activity monitor to track their sleep over seven days. Their preferred sleep timing was then compared to both their actual sleep and their mental health, which was determined through their health records. Analysis showed that night owls…  read on >  read on >

Ambulances meant for people having a mental health crisis could help folks get the care they need with less confrontation and friction, a new study says. People transported to the hospital by a “psychiatric ambulance” required fewer restraints or coercive measures than those transported by the police, according to results from an Amsterdam program. In 2014, Amsterdam introduced a psychiatric ambulance service operated by a trained driver and a psychiatric nurse. It looks just the same as a typical ambulance, but inside it’s stripped of visible medical equipment to create a more tranquil environment. Patients can sit upright or lay on a stretcher, with a soft Velcro restraint or sedative medication available as needed. Researchers compared nearly 500 police transports in the four months prior to introduction of the psychiatric ambulance, and more than 650 ambulance transports that occurred within six months after the service started. They found stark differences when it came to the use of restraints: 86% of people transported by ambulance were not restrained, compared with 57% of those transported by police. 42% of people transported by police were handcuffed, compared to less than 1% who went by ambulance. However, the occurrence of aggressive events was similarly low in both the ambulance and police groups, around 2%. The rates of hospital admission were similar between the two groups, 36% for ambulance versus…  read on >  read on >

America’s college students seem to be more stressed than ever, with a new report finding a sharp rise in cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and acute stress disorder (ASD) on campuses across the country. In a “national sample of U.S. college students, we found a notable increase in the prevalence of PTSD and ASD,” concluded a team led by Yusan Zhai, of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Rates of PTSD rose by 4.1 percentage points between 2017 and 2022, and stress disorder diagnoses rose by 0.5 percentage points, the data showed. Their findings were published May 30 in the journal JAMA Network Open. As Zhai’s group explained, any number of events — campus shootings, sexual assault, physical violence and natural disasters, for example — can trigger either PTSD or ASD. PTSD can lead to more persistent symptoms, while ASD’s impact may be more transient — anywhere from a few days to a month. In their study, the Birmingham researchers focused on 2017 through 2022, “a period marked by escalated societal stressors and global health crises,” including, of course, the pandemic. They looked at data from the ongoing Healthy Minds study, which tracks the mental health of over 392,000 people attending 332 different colleges and universities across the United States. About 58% of the students were female. The data showed that during the study…  read on >  read on >

Even as suicide rates have risen among Americans generally, one group appears to be bucking that trend: People diagnosed with cancer. Experts are crediting improved access to counseling and other “psychosocial care” with easing the emotional toll of cancer and keeping more patients from making tragic decisions. Nevertheless, cancer patients still face elevated risks for suicide, noted a team led by Dr. Qiang Liu of the National Cancer Center at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in Beijing. “The cancer-related suicide rate is estimated to be double that of the general population in the United States,” Liu’s group noted in the study. “Notably, the risk of suicide in men is significantly higher compared to women. This heightened cancer-related suicide risk remains elevated for up to 15 years following their diagnosis.” The new report was published May 27 in the journal Translational Psychiatry. In the study, Liu’s team looked at data on over 5 million Americans who’d been diagnosed with cancer between 1975 and 2017. Of the more than 8,000 who died by suicide, most (82%) were male, white (93%) and older (73% were ages 50 to 79). However, there was some good news: The rate at which suicide claimed the lives of people with cancer has declined steadily over the decades. These deaths first started to decline gradually between 1989 and 2013, the numbers showed,…  read on >  read on >

The old joke holds that fatherhood causes a man’s hair to go prematurely gray. Whether or not that’s true, being a father does appear to put men at greater risk of poor heart health later in life, a new study finds. Dads tended to have worse heart health than men without kids, based on factors like diet, exercise, smoking, weight, blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar, researchers reported in the journal AJPM Focus. “The changes in heart health we found suggest that the added responsibility of childcare and the stress of transitioning to fatherhood may make it difficult for men to maintain a healthy lifestyle, such as a healthy diet and exercise,” said researcher Dr. John James Parker, an assistant professor of pediatrics and general internal medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. For the study, researchers analyzed data from more than 2,800 men ages 45 to 84. Although fathers had worse heart health, the study also found they actually have lower death rates than men without kids. That might be because fathers have a better social support system, and social connectedness has been linked to a lower risk of death, Parker said. “Fathers may also be more likely to have someone as their future caretaker [i.e., their children] to help them attend medical appointments and manage medications and treatments as they…  read on >  read on >